Double Dexter (41 page)

“Very good, ma’am,” the clerk said. He turned to his computer, and I left Rita to go through all the little rituals of registration while I took Lily Anne and followed Cody and Astor over to a large rack holding pamphlets for all the many charming and glamorous attractions this Magic Isle held for even the most jaded traveler. Apparently,
one could do almost anything in Key West—as long as one had a couple of major credit cards and an overwhelming urge to buy T-shirts. The kids stared at the dozens of brightly colored brochures. Cody would frown and point to one, and Astor would pull it from its slot. Then their two heads came together over the pictures as they studied the page, Astor whispering to her brother and Cody nodding and frowning back at her, and then their eyes would snap up and they’d go back to the rack to pick another one. By the time Rita had us registered and came to join us, Astor held at least fifteen brochures.

“Well,” Rita said, as breathlessly as if she’d just run all the way from Miami. “We’re all set! Shall we go up to our room? I mean our
suite
—because we’re here and it’s— Oh, this hotel is just so— This is going to be so much fun!”

Perhaps I was just tired from grinding my teeth in traffic for seven and a half hours, but I found it hard to match Rita’s high-spirited enthusiasm. Still, we were here, and more or less intact. So I followed along behind her as she led us to the elevator and up to our room—I mean our suite.

The suite consisted of a large bedroom, a living area with a kitchenette and a foldout couch, and a tiled bathroom with a shower and a Jacuzzi. The entire suite had a faint smell to it, as if somebody had deep-fried a bag of lemons in a vat of toxic cleaning fluids. Rita rushed in and opened the curtains, revealing a beautiful view of the back side of the neighboring hotel. “Oh,” she gushed, “this is just so— Dexter, get the door; it’s the man with our bags— Look at this, Cody, Astor! We’re in Key West!”

I opened the door. As advertised, it was the man with our bags. He put them in the bedroom and then smiled at me so aggressively that I almost felt guilty giving him a mere five-dollar bill. But he accepted it without any kind of tantrum and vanished out the door. I barely had time to sit down before a second knock came on the door—this time another uniformed man, who wheeled in a crib, set it up for us, and gravely accepted another five dollars for his labors.

When he was gone I sat again, with Lily Anne bouncing in my lap. She and I watched as the other members of our little family scuttled through the suite and explored it, opening doors and cupboards and calling to each other with each new discovery. It all felt a little bit
unreal. Of course, Key West always does, but it seemed a bit more so this time. After all, I really shouldn’t have been here at all, and it made no sense to me that I was—yet here I sat in this bright and shiny tourist mecca, in an expensive hotel room—I mean
suite
—while only a few hours away some very serious and very bent cops were working overtime to frame me for murder. And on the other side of Miami, my brother was lounging around in the afterglow of a playdate that should have been mine. Those two things were immediate, important, and tangible to me in a way that our trip to this surreal oasis of greed never could be, and it was difficult to believe that I was trapped in a glitzy time-out while real life whirled away without me just a few hours north.

Rita finally finished opening all the cupboards and closets, and came to sit beside me. She reached over and took Lily Anne from my lap and sighed heavily. “Well,” she said, sounding utterly content. “Here we are.”

And as unlikely as it seemed to me, she was right. Here we were, and for the next few days, whatever happened in Real Life would have to happen without me.

S
INCE OUR REAL ESTATE AUCTION DID NOT TAKE PLACE UNTIL
tomorrow, we had a long afternoon and evening of what Rita called free time, which seemed like a very misleading thing to call something that cost so much. We all followed Rita through the streets of Old Key West buying bottled water—at airport prices—and then ice cream and a five-dollar cookie and sunglasses and sunscreen and hats and T-shirts and genuine Key West sandals. I began to feel like a portable ATM. At the rate I was tossing away cash, we would be dead broke by bedtime.

But there was no slowing down Rita. She was obviously set on forcing us all into a delirium of high-priced bankruptcy, and just to make sure I lost my last inhibitions about saving enough money to buy gas for the trip home, she even dragged us all to a very loud bar that opened onto the sidewalk. She ordered two mai tais and two virgin piña coladas, and when the bill came it was really no more than dinner for eight at a good restaurant. I sipped from the plastic cup, nearly poking out my eye with the little paper umbrella that was shoved into the bright pink slush, while Rita gave Astor her cell phone and made her snap a picture of the two of us standing in front of a large plastic shark with our mai tais raised.

I finished my drink without discovering any actual alcohol in it, and got a brief but blinding headache from slurping the frozen slop too fast. We trudged on up Duval Street, finding ever more ingenious ways to throw away money. Then we hurried back down the other side of Duval Street to Mallory Square and got there just in time to participate in a more free-form style of wasting money, the legendary sunset celebration. Rita handed dollar bills to Cody and Astor and urged them to fling them at the vast collection of jugglers, fire-eaters, acrobats, and other freeloaders—all climaxing when Rita herself dropped a ten-dollar bill into the outstretched hands of the man who forced a collection of domestic cats to leap through flaming hoops by screeching at them in a high-pitched voice with a strange foreign accent.

We had dinner at a charming place that claimed to serve the freshest seafood in town. It was not air-conditioned, so I hoped it really was fresh. Even with the ceiling fans whirling it was stiflingly hot, and after sitting at the large picnic-style table for five minutes I found that I was stuck to the bench. But the food came after only forty-five minutes, and the grease it had been cooked in was only a few days old, so I couldn’t really object when the bill came and the total was no more than the down payment on a new Mercedes.

Through it all the heat never let up, the crowd noise grew louder, and my wallet got much lighter. By the time we staggered back to the hotel I was soaked with sweat, half-deaf, and I had three new blisters on my feet. It was altogether a great deal more fun than I’d had in a long time, and as I slumped into a chair in our hotel room—
suite
—I remembered again why I really don’t like having fun.

I took a shower and when I came out, clean but very tired, Cody and Astor had settled down in front of the TV to watch a movie. Lily Anne was sound asleep in the crib, and Rita was sitting at the desk with the list of houses for tomorrow’s auction, frowning and scribbling in the margins. I went to bed and slid immediately into sleep, visions of dollar bills dancing in my head. They were all waving good-bye.

It was still half-dark when I opened my eyes the next morning. Rita sat at the desk, again—or still—flipping through the list of houses and scribbling on a legal pad. I looked at the clock on the bedside table. It said five forty-eight.

“Rita,” I said, in a voice that was somewhere between a croak and a gargle.

She didn’t look up. “I have to figure them all at the thirty-year fixed rate,” she said. “But if we finance it through Ernesto’s brother it’s a lower rate? But we pay closing.”

It was a little too much information for me in my barely awake state and I closed my eyes again. But I had just started to slide back into sleep when Lily Anne started to fuss. I opened one eye and looked at Rita; she was pretending she didn’t hear Lily Anne, which is Married Person Code for,
You do it, dear
. So I bade a fond farewell to the whole idea of slumber and got up. I changed Lily Anne’s diaper and made her a bottle of formula, and by the time I was done she had made it clear that she was awake and that was all there was to it.

The sign in the hotel’s lobby had said that breakfast was served starting at six a.m. If I was going to be awake, I decided I should do it right and have some coffee and an assembly-line Danish. I got dressed and, with Lily Anne under one arm, headed for the door.

But two steps into the living room a small blond head popped up from the tangle of blankets on the foldout couch. “Where are you going, Dexter?” Astor said.

“Breakfast.”

“We wanna come, too,” she said, and she and Cody both exploded up out of the bedding and onto the floor as if they had been loaded into a torpedo tube and waiting for me to swim by.

By the time they were dressed, Rita had come out to see what all the fuss was about, and decided to come with us. So ten minutes after I had taken my tentative step toward the door and coffee, the entire troupe was on the march for the dining room.

There were only two other people there: a couple of middle-aged men who looked like they were on their way out to go fishing. We sat down as far from the TV as possible and tore into a surprisingly good buffet, considering it was just $19.95 per person.

I sipped a cup of coffee that tasted like it had been made at my office last year, frozen, and shipped down to Key West in a barrel of bait. Still, it definitely got my eyes open. I found myself thinking of Brian and what he had almost certainly finished by now. I was a little jealous; I hoped he’d taken his time and had a little fun.

I thought about Hood and Doakes and wondered whether they had followed me down here after all. I was sure they’d want to—but technically that would be a little bit outside the rules, wouldn’t it? Still, Doakes had never let regulations dampen his zeal. And I didn’t think Hood could actually understand the rules, since many of them had words in them with more than one syllable. I was pretty sure they’d turn up sooner or later.

My train of thought was derailed when Rita slapped the list onto the table and spoke very definitely. “Five,” she said, frowning heavily and tapping one of the entries with a pencil.

“Excuse me?” I said politely.

She looked up at me blankly. “Five,” she said again. “Five
houses
. The others are all …” She vigorously shook her hand, the one with the pencil, and went on in a brittle and rapid voice. “Too big. Too small. Wrong area. Bad zoning. High tax base. Old roof and maybe—”

“So there are five possible houses to bid on that might work for us?” I said, because I have always believed that both people in a conversation should know what they are talking about.

“Yes, of course,” Rita said, frowning again, and then smacking the paper with her pencil. “This one, on a Hundred and Forty-second Terrace, this would be the best, and it’s not that far from the house we’re in now, but—”

“Do we have to talk about all that boring house stuff?” Astor interrupted. “Can’t we go to the aquarium, and then just buy a house later?”

“Astor, no, we can’t—don’t interrupt,” Rita said. “This is extremely important and I— You have no idea how much we still have to do, just to be ready by three o’clock.”

“But we don’t
all
have to do it,” Astor said in her very best reasonable whine. “We wanna go to the aquarium.” She looked at Cody, and he nodded at her, and then at his mother.

“That’s impossible,” Rita said. “This is one of the most important decisions— And your future! Because you will be living there for a very long time.”

“Aquarium,” Cody said softly. “Feed the sharks.”

“What? Feed the— Cody, you can’t feed the sharks,” Rita said.

“You can so feed the sharks,” Astor said. “It says in the brochure.”

“That’s crazy; they’re
sharks,
” Rita said with emphasis, as if Astor had used the word wrong. “And the auction is only— Oh, look at the time.” She began to flutter in place on her chair, stuffing the pencil into her purse and waving the list of houses to summon the waiter. And I, sensing that there are certain forms of tedium that are best endured without me, looked at Cody and Astor, and then turned to Rita.

“I’ll take the kids to the aquarium,” I said.

Rita looked up at me, startled. “What? Dexter, no, don’t be— We have to go through this whole list, let alone the five—and then register with the— No, there’s too much,” she said.

Once again, my extensive background watching daytime drama told me the right move to make, and I reached across to put my hand on top of hers—not an easy thing to do, since the hand was in constant motion. But I snared it and pinned it to the table and then, leaning over as close to her as I could get, I said, “Rita. This is something you know more about than the rest of us combined. More important, we trust you to do it right.”

Cody and Astor are not slow, and they knew a dramatic cue when they heard one. Cody nodded rapidly and Astor said, “Totally, Mom, really.”

“Besides,” I said, “they’re kids. They’re in a strange new place, and they want to see new and exciting things.” “Feed the sharks,” Cody said stubbornly.

“And it’s educational!” Astor almost shouted, which I thought might have been overkill.

But apparently the shot went home, because Rita no longer seemed so certain when she said, “But the list, and Dexter, really, you ought to … you know.”

“You’re right,” I said, which was at least possible. “But, Rita—look at them.” I nodded at the kids, who both instantly put on beaten-puppy faces. “And I really do trust you to do the right thing. Completely,” I added, giving her hand a little squeeze for emphasis.

“Well, but really,” Rita said feebly.

“Pleeeeeeeeeease?” Astor said, and Cody added, “Sharks, Mom.”

Rita looked from one to the other, chewing rapidly on her lip until I was afraid she would chomp it right off. “Well,” she said. “If it’s just …”

“Yay!” Astor called out, and Cody nearly smiled. “Thanks, Mom!” Astor added, and she and her brother both jumped up from the table.

“But you brush your teeth first!” Rita said. “And, Dexter, they have to put on sunscreen—it’s on the desk up in our room, our suite.”